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Feel Free

Essays

Audiobook
1 of 2 copies available
1 of 2 copies available
Winner of the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism 
A New York Times Notable Book
From Zadie Smith, one of the most beloved authors of her generation, a new collection of essays

Since she burst spectacularly into view with her debut novel almost two decades ago, Zadie Smith has established herself not just as one of the world's preeminent fiction writers, but also a brilliant and singular essayist. She contributes regularly to The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books on a range of subjects, and each piece of hers is a literary event in its own right.
Arranged into five sections—In the World, In the Audience, In the Gallery, On the Bookshelf, and Feel Free—this new collection poses questions we immediately recognize. What is The Social Network—and Facebook itself—really about? "It's a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore." Why do we love libraries? "Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay." What will we tell our granddaughters about our collective failure to address global warming? "So I might say to her, look: the thing you have to appreciate is that we'd just been through a century of relativism and deconstruction, in which we were informed that most of our fondest-held principles were either uncertain or simple wishful thinking, and in many areas of our lives we had already been asked to accept that nothing is essential and everything changes—and this had taken the fight out of us somewhat."
Gathering in one place for the first time previously unpublished work, as well as already classic essays, such as, "Joy," and, "Find Your Beach," Feel Free offers a survey of important recent events in culture and politics, as well as Smith's own life. Equally at home in the world of good books and bad politics, Brooklyn-born rappers and the work of Swiss novelists, she is by turns wry, heartfelt, indignant, and incisive—and never any less than perfect company. This is literary journalism at its zenith.
Zadie Smith's new book, Grand Union, is on sale 10/8/2019.
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  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      An audiobook of Zadie Smith's essays can be daunting: Where does one topic end and another begin? But narrator Nikki Amuka-Bird's reassuring tone shepherds the listener with subtle modulations. Her voice changes with each imagined setting and situation: brunch with friends discussing rap, race, and class; an after-work lounge discussion of artists and camp; a dinner party conversation comparing various dancers throughout the twentieth century. In this way, Amuka-Bird's mellow British voice is a marvel. Smith's breadth of subject matter can seem overwhelming, so the listener can appreciate the evenness of the narration and better absorb the substance of each topic. Music, art, dance, technology, British and American politics, and love are all treated dispassionately, and Amuka-Bird's self-assured tone is a perfect match for Smith's musings. M.P.P. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      November 20, 2017
      In this collection of conversational essays, novelist Smith (Swing Time) brings her precise observations and distinct voice to an expansive range of topics. Smith comes across as a writer’s writer, with a love of form, function, and language—“Oh, the semicolons, the discipline!” she exclaims of Edward St. Aubyn. A self-professed “sentimental humanist,” Smith is alarmed by social media platforms such as Facebook and is smartly cutting on American race relations, discussed through pop-culture reference points that include Jay-Z lyrics and movies such as Get Out, “a compendium of black fears about white folk.” She is lacerating on the subject of British politics, blasting the ruling class’s “Londoncentric solipsism”; rather than policy changes, she advocates for nothing more—or less—than art and literature’s power to free the mind. At their most memorable, the essays are character studies, whether of a culture, such as the “limitless” Manhattan of “Find Your Beach”; a place, such as Rome’s Villa Borghese in “Love in the Gardens”; or a person, such as Billie Holliday in “Crazy They Call Me.” Smith’s explicit discomfort with any authoritative stance—“I have no real qualifications to write as I do”—feels a bit disingenuous, when this collection’s chief appeal lies in the revealing glimpses it affords into the mind and creative process of one of the most admired novelists writing in English.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      March 26, 2018
      British actress Amuka-Bird channels both the public persona and literary essence of novelist and essayist Smith in giving voice to this sprawling collection of nonfiction works. The essays vary in topic and include criticism of visual and literary arts, musings on pop culture, and incisive takes on current politics on both sides of the Atlantic; Amuka-Bird handles the sometimes swift transitions gracefully. She adds an especially evocative touch in her reading of Smith’s works that tackle racial and cultural identity. For Smith’s experimental piece on the tortured life of music legend Billie Holiday, which is written from the first-person perspective of Holiday, Amuka-Bird provides a chilling rendition of the singer’s bluesy, conversational cadence. When Smith recounts recent interviews with entertainers such as rapper Jay-Z and comedian and director Jordan Peele, Amuka-Bird doesn’t shy away from adding biting edges to their voices. Not every piece of this stylistically wide-ranging collection translates easily into the audio format, but Amuka-Bird’s talent cannot be denied. A Penguin hardcover.

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  • English

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